Assessing English-Translated Profiles of Chinese Companies: A Corpus-based Comparative Study From the Perspectives of Lexical Features and Intersubjectivity

Based on the Communicative Action Theory, intersubjectivity theory and the interpersonal classification of metadiscourse, this study makes a comparison between the source texts and the English-translated texts of Chinese company profiles with a self-built parallel corpus, along the dimensions of lexical variation, lexical density, grammatical explicitation and metadiscourse use. The purpose of this study is to evaluate English-translated company profiles by examining the lexical features and intersubjectivity. The research findings are as follows. First, English company profiles show a lower degree of lexical variation and density and a higher degree of grammatical explicitation, and use more metadiscourse resources. Second, metadiscourse resources construct the intersubjectivity of company profiles by fulfilling the Universal Validity Claims required by communicative actions. Third, English-translated company profiles are much easier to understand, with a clearer logic and a higher degree of intersubjectivity.